Stag Night (2010)

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

The plot isn't so bad, but the pace of storytelling is too slow which makes people bored. Certain moments are so obvious and unnecessary for the main plot. I would've fast-forwarded those moments if it was an online streaming. The ending looks like implying a sequel, not sure if this movie will get one

Four men out on a STAG NIGHT in New York prematurely exit an underground train after the soon-to-be-best-man begins to hassle two women. Trapped at a deserted station these six adults become the target of a gruesome manhunt when a secret gang of cannibal dwellers, living in the tunnels discovers them. Tensions will rise as they fight to make it through the night with all their limbs attached.I am almost ashamed that I waited this long to see "Stag Night". For some reason I just never got around to watching it until two nights ago. Wow. This film was furious and stressful to watch. In a good way. I first thought it was going to be lame because of the set up. A group of guys out for a bachelor party thing. Thinking it would be another rich kids on wrong side of town flick I flippantly sat down to this film and began having my nerves shot and my mind knotted.First off the film is shot in a very gritty and visually dark manner similar to "Mimic". The golden shadowy glow that makes me think of candle light for some reason. Anyway. It becomes more like an urban legend on steroids. The concept of a whole barbaric and viscous world under the city were what comes down gets eaten is raised to a high energy fright train of a ride for this group of guys who along the subway ride meet up with a couple of girls and things don't go as planned.The film kinda starts a little slow at first but as soon as they step off the train and release their error this little flick does not let up until the very last second of the film. The action is fast paced and intense. The drama is in your face and truthful to the experience if it really could happen. You would actually feel this is how you would act. Well me I would have worked like a motherf*cker on that d*mn chain and lock on the abandoned station doorway until it f*cking broke and got my sorry a$$ up and out.One by one the characters are chased down and brutalized in a flat out gore rich pounding from psycho hyper-disturbed cannibal homeless clan. This is fear of the tunnel people amplified. Use to be rats, gangs, regular subway homeless and the occasional C.H.U.D. was all you had to worry about but now you have blood thirsty amped up cannibals ready to run you down and gut you like a pig.The story was great. Little dialog other than necessary to convey terror and heavy on the action and violence. The cast made you believe every gut wrenching moment of there nightmare tunnel trip. This film is a great horror tale spun from urban legend that I am truly ashamed to say I missed when it first came out. Glad I took the time to sit down and watch this flick.

Yes, Stag Night is derivative of those movies from the past where victims find themselves in the wrong place, unaware of the menace that lives within the environs they are trapped and unfamiliar. The menaces are hideous, grotesque underground subway dwellers, more than likely spawns of incest due to their inability to speak and obvious physical deformities. Five buddies (Kip Pardue and Breckin Meyer, familiar faces among them) are celebrating bachelor's night in NYC, getting kicked out of a club. They decide to hitch a ride (illegally without paying the toll) on a subway, meeting two girls (one, Vinessa Shaw, the Aja remake of The Hills Have Eyes, perhaps what horror fans will know her from), all getting off when the train stops momentarily, left accidentally by the conductor. They trek throughout the foreboding tunnels of the underground subway system, seeing the aforementioned psycho killers butchering a security guard warning them to quit fooling around with a snack machine. The killers carry home-made machete swords and spears, wearing scraggly clothes, their hygiene worse for wear. Most of the film has these human monsters chasing down and slaughtering members of the group, feeding the body parts to their blood-thirsty mutts. What this does have going for it (which isn't originality or a very steady camera) is its willingness to not give any member of the hunted cast a break; all are lambs to the slaughter. All are at one point or another stabbed and put through the ringer. The hunters all look like Rob Zombie from his White Zombie days, and they live for the kill. Pardue is the star with Shaw his aide as Meyer serves as the tag-along buddy always reminding them that they are certain to perish, never to make it out alive. The other guys and girl serve as bloody meat to be skewered and filleted. Lots of prosthetics, limbs and especially severed heads, are used in abundance. Constant running and fear, with the ever-present threat of gross inbred bums wielding blades always lurking around. I think the film's greatest asset is how it establishes a way of life underneath the city, that a whole community exists, including the wackos who have a shack they keep a female mannequin(!) watching television and their barking human-meat eating dogs chained. This will be appreciated by those who love their subway horror because the setting is presented as a labyrinth with few (if any) exits; what is scary is not only becoming lost underground but pursued by those who call it their home.

This movie is terrible. So bad so, I have written and re-written this review because I'm afraid IMDb would find the post offensive. I will keep is simple: terrible script that wants the viewer to be completely void of common sense; situations that are completely out of this world in a bad way; I just want to prattle on but I can't because I'm allowing this film to waste more and more of my time. Never have I rooted for EVERYONE to die in this film. I wanted a nuke just to take out the whole city and end it all. I should have realized how bad it was when we as the views see the reason the 6 characters get off of the subway. That in itself made it evident that I was in for a steaming pile.Avoid, avoid, avoid.

Stag Night is set in New York & starts late one night as three friends are thrown out of a strip club, soon to be married Mike (Kip Pardue) is out on a stag night with his brother Tony (Breckin Meyer) & his mate Carl (Scott Adkins) & decide to hit another bar after being thrown out of the strip club. The three friends think a short subway ride will get them to their next drinking hole but Tony makes unwanted advances on the train towards a pretty girl named Brita (Vanessa Shaw) who pulls the emergence exit switch & leaves the train ending up stranded on an abandoned station along with Tony, Mike, Carl & her friend Michelle (Sarah Barrand) when the train pulls away without them. Alone with no phone signal the small group are trapped & decide to walk through the tunnels to the next station but witness a policeman being murdered by tunnel dwelling tramps & soon find themselves running for their lives...Written & directed by Peter A. Dowling this fairly forgettable slasher film steals it's plot & locations from films such as the classic Death Line (1972) & the more recent Creep (2004), while not terrible Stag Night left me rather cold. The script is rather vague & takes itself far too seriously, there's never really any explanation who the killers are or even why they kill people, it's not to eat them as they just cut their victims up & feed it to their dogs, there's no explanation or reason why the normal looking homeless community seen at the end are in league with the killers, there's no apparent connection between the two & the killers can't even speak for some reason which just leaves boring dirty human killers who scream & grunt a lot while chasing a few people along dark subway tunnels. At only just over 80 minutes at least it's short & it moves along at a reasonable pace but by the hour mark I was sitting there thinking how repetitive Stag Night had become, basically the film just descends into scene after scene of a few people being chased around really dark subway tunnels & I just found it got tiresome after a while. The character's are alright but they won't live long in the memory, or at least in mine anyway & the lack of any sort of background or origin for the killers just seems a little lazy. I mean it's not exactly like Stag Night is overflowing with plot as it is so why the makers couldn't have fleshed the killers out a bit & give them some story or even gave them some basis in reality I don't know. Stag Night is pretty predictable, there's no logical reason why Brita would open the doors at an abandoned station & then everyone get off the train or how a guy with a serious injury can outrun a dog & a psycho killer who were literally a few feet behind him one scene & then nowhere to be seen in the next. In the great scheme of things Stag Night is watchable enough if you don't watch much horror in general but for those like me who are genre fans & do watch lots of horror Stag Night is nothing special & I will have probably forgotten all about it within a week.One major black mark against Stag Night is the camera-work, it's of the shaky jerky can't see anything variety which gets so annoying to watch it's a wonder why filmmakers still continue to overuse this irritating technique. There are one or two good gore scenes with good special effects but there's not enough of them, there's a cool moment in which someones head is squashed by a moving train-track, there are impalings, some severed limbs & guts, a decent decapitation & a bitten throat but as I said there's just not enough here for my liking. Ceratinly competently made & quite slick it's a shame the film as a whole is bland, lifeless & ordinary.With a supposed budget of about $4,000,000 this was filmed in New York & in Bulgaria where things are obviously cheaper. The acting is alright from an alright cast but no-one is going to win any awards.Stag Night is a very ordinary horror film that borrows all of it's ideas from better films, while competent Stag Night is forgettable on every level. I wouldn't want to watch it again to be honest.